Sweet Sorrow
by David Nicholls (Hodder & Stoughton, $35 Reviewed by Helen Brown
‘First love,’’ says the heroine of David Nicholls’ fifth novel, is like ‘‘a stupid pop song that you hear and you think, ‘Well this is all I will ever want to listen to, it’s got everything.’ ’Course, we wouldn’t put it on now. We’re too hard and experienced and sophisticated. But when it comes on the radio, well, it’s still a good song.’’
It’s a bittersweet pleasure, of the kind that shivered down the spines of Nicholls’ bestselling ‘‘tragi-roms’’ One Day (2009) and Us (2014). And to lie in the long grass and immerse yourself in the giddy thrills and nails-in-the-palm cringes of this pitch-perfect teen romance feels like an extended version of singing along to your own adolescent ‘‘our song’’.
The couple at the heart of Sweet Sorrow meet in the mid-90s in a classically Nichollsian manner. Seventeen-year-old Charlie – a sensitive observer nicknamed ‘‘Nobody’’ by his mates – is adrift in the long suburban summer holidays after flunking his exams. His friends are preparing for college and he feels himself drifting into the future like an untethered astronaut. With a depressed, alcoholic, unemployed dad keeping irregular hours at home, the only structure in Charlie’s life comes from a part-time job at the petrol station.
He’s lying in a field reading Slaughterhouse Five when Fran Fisher comes literally crashing into his life. Her foot twists into a rabbit hole, he helps her up. Fran is part of an acting company, mounting an open-air production of Romeo and Juliet at a local manor house. They’re short of actors, and she flirts Charlie into joining them. Nicholls makes exquisite work of the class divide between them. Though Fran never condescends, Charlie knows that kids from her world: ‘‘were posh, were arty stoners, were hippies’’. His own class had been ‘‘distinguished by a strong criminal element, bicycle thieves and shoplifters and arsonists’’.
Their romance is exhilarating. You catch yourself knocking back paragraphs like a teenager doing shots. Nicholls has been accused of coyness before. But here he is terrific on the fumbles of beginners’ sex, experienced to a soundtrack of Portishead, Elliott Smith and Mazzy Star.
As a former actor, Nicholls is very funny on the absurdities of the Arts Council-funded theatre group, with their ponderous trust exercises and ‘‘relevant’’ costumes ripping off every RSC production of the previous decade. A more cliched narrative would have seen Charlie transformed by his contact with Shakespeare and this middle-class world of couscous served in salad bowls made out of reclaimed wood. But the events of that summer – the family drama, the loss of virginity and committing of a crime – mould him into a sharp, thoughtful narrator.
Although first love drives the novel’s sweetness, the sorrow comes from Charlie’s home life. He’s determined to extract every pound of guilt from his mother. But he also loves his father more than anybody else in the world. Charlie’s infatuation with Fran’s perfect young body is balanced by a terrifying revulsion for the stooped and redeyed wreck his dad is becoming. He knows that while first love was a song for Fran, for him it was something more desperate.
People who’ve never read Nicholls tend to dismiss him as sentimental and lightweight. Though Sweet Sorrow is certainly pulse-quickening enough to absorb readers through this summer’s airport delays and rained-off beach days, it’s no escapist fantasy.
– The Daily Telegraph